Back when I dual booted, I had the most success keeping Windows on a separate drive completely. After making the Linux drive the primary boot device, GRUB would pick it up and I'd be off to the races. I now just keep a Windows VM -- it's been much easier to deal with.
Boy howdy, you best keep that BitLocker key handy, though.
I'm not following, do you need the bitlocker key when Linux is on a separate disk? is there something extra you need to keep in mind compared to just running windows?
Just when recovering a windows partition encrypted with bitlocker.
I was going to dual boot, to kind of test the waters of using Linux as my primary. Then I heard there were is with Windows not wanting to play nice, so now I just run Linux.
And to be honest I don't actually know what any of the issues are, I didn't care enough to even search it. I just said Fuck Windows and moved on with my life.
That was probably the right move. I had multiple drives, but only one SSD at the time, and I decided to dual boot with both on that SSD. Long story short, Windows fucked it up, I spent a lot of time recovering things, but Windows was never able to be recovered (I did manage to get Linux Bootable again). I decided to grab anything important off that drive and then just turned it fully into a Linux drive, and ditched Windows completely. It's been great since.
Windows is literally designed to break multi-boot setups. Funny enough, multibooting on a Mac was never a big problem. Microsoft has more of a reason to cooperate here and they just can’t help themselves.
Setting a BIOS password stops Windows from fucking with most things in your boot partition, I’d open-mouth kiss whomever told me that tip
I told you. Now kiss me ( ˘ ³˘)
This info would have been so fucking useful a decade or two ago
you mean that password function actually had a use this whole time?!?
Always keep a backup of your boot partition, when dual booting with windows. I wouldn’t encourage a windows boot though
I have dual boot for long time already. Win 11 + Ubuntu. Although there was no any critical issues so far, except some mess up with internet connection on my ubuntu few times.
Windows only in a VM.
That is the only way.
I'm glad I've always kept Windows on a separate disk.
Mine still got fucked.
I dual boot grub+linux from a wholly separate drive set as the boot drive, windows boot loader is unused, untouched, isolated on the windows drive.
Windows update still broke grub.
Pull my hair out for a few hours trying to find a fix, about to try something but have to reboot one last time.
Everything is fine, back to normal.
Windows is the virus
I've been dualbooting for over a year now. Made sure each system has its own separate drive. I've noticed that every time I had to reinstall Linux, my windows boot entry is gone and then I can't access it no matter what I tried. Turned out installing Linux first then windows was my mistake. When installing windows while there is a Linux install, windows will see the EFI partition already there and just decides to share it, and doesn't create its own.
I found that out by accident while I was in windows' storage management. There was no efi partition. Took a whole day to find out how to create one on the same drive where windows is installed and removing the one it created on the Linux partition. It was so painful.
Bottomline, install windows first if you want to dualboot. After that, even if windows takes over the boot after an update, all it does is resets the boot sequence and makes it default to it. You'd just need to access the bios and reset the sequence to prioritize Linux. That's it
When installing windows while there is a Linux install, windows will see the EFI partition already there and just decides to share it, and doesn’t create its own.
That's what it's supposed to do, it's a plain FAT32 partition, the bootloaders are just files you put in there.
Part of the issue is that while a well-made motherboard will look for all bootloaders on the partition and present them as options in the firmware UI, bad ones will only look for a specific file (\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI) and use that. For an OS to have a chance of booting on those boards it has to overwrite that file, blowing away whatever other bootloader was there before.
It's annoying, since Windows is mostly well behaved here (It puts the main copy of the bootloader at \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi and Linux bootloaders can see that and offer it, the reverse isn't true) and can co-exist with Linux well (Well...), but manufacturers cutting corners causes more problems for everybody.
Just stop dual booting. This is self-inflicted harm. Setup a VM or find a native workaround.
What the heck is the origin of this meme template? And am I the only one who thought this was Roger Stone?
that's why i just deleted my entire hard drive and installed mint on the whole thing
man this meme is als old as windows 7 or has been recreated in exact this form over and over again, i am not sure witch of those
Put Windows and Linux on two separate physical drives and this will never happen
Oh it absofuckinglutely happens. If you install Linux first then Windows, windows will see the boot partition and use it instead of creating its own. Install windows first on its own, then install Linux. How I know? Hmmmmm
To my own surprise, it can happen.
I know this one weird trick to avoid this..
Variations of this meme get posted every week, but I've never experienced it, despite having had tens of grub updates murder-suicide the Windows boot loader and grub itself across five or six different machines. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to rebuild a Windows boot partition, but the frequency that I'm hit with this problem is one of the major reasons I avoid using Linux. Eventually I'm going to have to switch, but that's driven mainly by Windows getting worse rather than any of the pain points I've had when trying to switch full time in the past having been fixed.
windows removed my grub bootloader at least 3 times even once after i started using seperate drives.
ive never had the opposite happen.
Easily solved. Just run mkfs_ext4 on the windows partition, and mount it as an additional filesystem.
My windows ssd died about 2 weeks ago, but I was dual booting.
Took out the windows drive, slapped in a new one and I was no longer getting failed smart checks.
Happy to say that the windows drive that died was replaced with a new 990… that’ll be more storage for my Fedora Plasma system instead of getting windows 10 reinstalled. Win 11 was never a consideration but I did want to keep 10 around for as long as I could.
c'est la vie
I literally had the same thing happen to me last week. I'm done with windows. Hello ubuntu
Imagine dual booting in 2025.
I don’t have a choice but to have Windows available. I have a close friend group who plays an old Half Life 1 mod online and it does NOT work at all on Linux. We’re the only people still playing it so there’s no support available. It’s janky sometimes even on Windows, but we’re never giving it up, it’s too much fun.
Which mod tho
Oh sorry!
The Specialists HD. It’s a shooter with kung-fu and sick flips and all sorts of crazy shenanigans.
I actually had a Linux update do this once when it updated grub. Took a bit to fix but nothing was lost.
Hint: :q!
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